Ontology Based Data Access Methods to Teach Students to Transform Traditional Information Systems and Simplify Decision Making Process

Abstract

We describe a service-based approach that provides a natural language interface to legacy information systems, built on top of relational database management systems. The long term goal is to make data management and analysis accessible to a wider range of users for a diverse range of purposes and to simplify the decision making process. We present an ontology-driven web-service, named Reply, that transforms traditional information systems into intelligent systems, endowed with a natural language interface, so that they can be queried by any novice user much like modern day search engines. The principal mechanism of our approach is turning a natural language query into a SQL-query for structured data sources by using Ontology-Based Data Access methods. We also outline how the proposed approach allows semantic searching of large structured, unstructured, or semi-structured data within the database or outside sources, thus helping bridge the talent gap in the case of Big Data Analytics used by researchers and postgraduate students.